A Must-Read: The New York Times Book Review, Nylon, Star Tribune, Ms., Kirkus Reviews, The Bay Area Reporter, Town & Country, InsideHook
" A] monumental biography." --Hilton Als, The New Yorker
"A rich portrait of a glittering, communal, and bygone NYC . . . and] of the glamorous queer icon." --Arimeta Diop, Vanity Fair
From the acclaimed biographer Cynthia Carr, the first full portrait of the queer icon and Warhol superstar Candy Darling.
You must always be yourself no matter what the price . . . Don't dare destroy your passion for the sake of others.
The Warhol superstar and transgender icon Candy Darling was glamour personified, but she was without a real place in the world.
Growing up on Long Island, lonely and quiet and queer, she was enchanted by Hollywood starlets like Kim Novak. She found her turn in New York's early Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, in Warhol's films Flesh and Women in Revolt, and at the famed nightclub Max's Kansas City. She inspired songs by Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones. She became friends with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, borrowed a dress from Lauren Hutton, posed for Richard Avedon, and performed alongside Tennessee Williams in his own play.
Yet Candy lived on the edge, relying on the kindness of strangers, friends, and her quietly devoted mother, sleeping on couches and in cheap hotel rooms, keeping a part of herself hidden. She wanted to be a star, but mostly she wanted to be loved. Her last diary entry was: "I shall try to be grateful for life . . . Cannot imagine who would want me." Candy died at twenty-nine in 1974, just as conversations about gender and identity were beginning to enter the broader culture. She never knew it, but she changed the world.
Brimming with all the fizz and wildness of New York in the 1960s and '70s, this is the first biography of this extraordinary figure--an unintentional pioneer who became an icon. Cynthia Carr's Candy Darling is packed with tales of luminaries, gossip, and meticulous research, laced with Candy's words and her friends' recollections, and signals Candy's long-overdue return to the spotlight.
Includes 16 pages of color photographs
Industry Reviews
"What an inspiring book! First you think, 'I know that.' But then you think, 'Oh I didn't know that, or that or that.' The very identity of Candy Darling, what it was like to be a trans kid growing up in the 1950s, and the landscape surrounding her, gets renovated in this wake-up take on gender in the '60s and '70s. The web of detail assembled by culture sleuth Cynthia Carr is quickened by the facts of Candy's tireless beauty, charm, and charisma--and oh so much pain. Complexly wrenching, startling, entirely fresh, and frankly alive, Candy Darling delivers an altogether frank and shimmering portrait of a self-made American female deity, more than a bit of a prophet, constructed whole cloth from her own and everyone else's desiring dream. Omigod, what a trip!"
--Eileen Myles, author of a "Working Life"
"Candy Darling willed herself to be beautiful, and she succeeded: she was uniquely, spectrally beautiful. But the world made her pay for it. The prejudice against gender choice kept her poor, beholden to others, shunned, disrespected, disinvited, and locked up within herself. Cynthia Carr's minute reconstruction of her life is brilliant and profoundly sad. As if Candy's ghost were dictating the terms, it keeps her an enigma, a consummate life actress who never dressed down."
--Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name
"Deftly reported and full of fresh facts and interviews as well as glittering gossip, Cynthia Carr's Candy Darling allows us to see--truly, for the first time--this celluloid wisp of a Warhol superstar in all her humanity and in all her doomed performance art, trying to pass 24-7 as Kim Novak or Marilyn Monroe, existing 2D in a 3D world. Updating all the camp and vamp, Carr is a trustworthy, sensitive guide to the nuances of Candy's experience as she emerges as a historical trans pioneer, caught between gender dysphoria and her own blonder gender euphoria."
--Brad Gooch, author of Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring
